The only way to beat the BNP is an open debate about immigration

It could have been worse – two BNP candidates get to join the gravy train in Brussels but a month ago political bookies were predicting five, six or even eight seats for "Britain's foremost patriotic party". Yet it was still a two-fingered salute to the political establishment, and one that came after the most prolonged media and political campaign against any party in modern British political history. If Ian Huntley had appeared on Britain's Got Talent he would have received a better reception than Nick Griffin on Radio 4.

I suspect many potential voters switched to UKIP in the end, overcome with guilt at the polling both.Â

An acquaintance of mine, an old south Londoner who joined the white flight to Surrey only for ethnic vibrancy to follow him, told me his hand hovered over the top of the ballot paper but his "damned Catholic upbringing" prevented him and he opted for Nigel Farage's party. For a younger generation, raised on a moral code that sees racism as the worst possible sin, supporting a neo-fascist party led by a man who once described the Shoah as the "Holohoax" is a great psychological step, akin to coming out of the closet.

The anti-BNP campaign was so sustained I couldn't wait for the election to be over just so I didn't have to hear about them any more. On the right ConservativeHome produced their campaign, "There's nothing British about the BNP".Â ConservativeHome is one of the best in the blogosphere, but I thought their video was dreadful. It looked like medieval lords pleading with their serfs not to turn away and join the revolt ("You like football don't you, proles? Ben here won't be able to play for England if those nasty men come to power").Â

The Left focused on the BNP's personalities, an open goal when most of their leaders look like football hooligans or paedophiles, and when they so easily win the contest for "which party would I least like to have around for dinner" (with Respect comfortably second, and probably the Greens third).

My particular favourite BNP ork was Barry Bennett, the half-Jewish candidate for the South West, who once said: "I know perfectly respectable half-Jews in the BNP… even Hitler had honorary Aryans who were of Jewish descent… so whatever's good enough for Hitler's good enough for me. God rest his soul." My God, where does a shrink start?

Hitler didn't, in fact, have honorary Aryans, despite what Mr Bennett thinks, and most Jews are aware of it. My part of north London is home to the Jewish News, which warned last week about "jackboots" in Parliament, begging its readers to keep out the BNP. Hard to argue with that – except I wonder how Jews will feel about living in a London that is one-quarter or one-thrird Muslim? Jackboots are the least of their worries, I suspect.

That figure is not some far-off prediction from MajorityRights or Altermedia, it is the immediate future. Infants entering nursery school in Greater London this autumn will be the first with a non-white majority in history, despite a massive influx of Poles in the past five years. And that's only counting the whole county – in London proper, inside the A406, the rate of change is far more extreme.

Even with the London authority's incredibly conservative estimate, which seems to be based on the assumption that the rest of Poland will move here over the next decade, London in 15 years time will look vastly different to today, let alone 30 or 50 years ago. The same is true across the country, where almost 25 per cent of children are born to foreign-born mothers. This is not diversity or cosmopolitanism any more, it is a sweeping demographic change unseen in British history, and a utopian experiment as radical and reckless as Communism.Â

Pro-immigration campaigners cite the Huguenots or the Jews as precedents – yet the numbers involved are incomparable. The Huguenots, at their peak, comprised 0.25 per cent of the population – to give some idea of how that impacted on everyday life, today there are a higher proportion of Germans in Great Britain than there ever were French Protestants, and how prominent will that migration feature in British history books?

And yet not one of these anti-BNP campaigns dares address this fact. Not once did any politician acknowledge that the reason the BNP have risen from a bunch of cranks and lunatics who could fit in a pub, into a nasty but electable party is because they are the only people even "having a debate", to use the political parlance, about immigration and demographics. By all means point out their political heritage and their lies and personality disorders, but address the issue as well.

Health secretary Andy Burnham said last last night that this was a "sad day", and I'll agree with him 100 per cent on that – but it was one of Labour's making. Unless the mainstream parties show some courage and address the issue of immigration, there will be more sad days to come.